Mark Shrayber

Are you tired of your friends and relatives (mainly relatives) cluttering up your facebook feed with clickbait headlines from Upworthy that insist your heart will stop when you see a particular image of flowers or that your mind will be blown when you hear the third word that a toddler had to say to a mean teacher? Well, there's help. You can't make your aunt Ginny stop posting (she just has to do what she has to do, my friend), but you can install Downworthy, a newly created chrome plugin whose designer is working on turning those maddeningly positive headlines into sarcastic and cynical one-liners that may fit better with the dark and stormy world-view that these same headlines may have created by sheer virtue of their existence.

Created by coder Alison Gianotto, the open-source browser plugin replaces the you-won't-believe-this language of a clickbait headline with more realistic wording for cynics like me. For example, the ubiquitous usage of "one weird trick" is transformed into "one piece of completely anecdotal horseshit," and "go viral" becomes "be overused so much that you'll silently pray for the sweet release of death to make it stop."

Excellent! Let's have a round of applause for Gianotto who is truly doing the lord's work on the internet and making the world of social media safer for all of us misanthropes out there. Let's take a look at some of the changes that happen when you install the plugin: